Monday, September 22, 2008
Connotea: the delicious.com for scientists integrated in Scoofers
Scoofers uses social bookmarking for improving the search results. The search results are powered by the Google Custom Search engine technologies, but influenced by thousands of social bookmarks on for instance delicious.com. Lately we at Scoofers, discovered Connotea. Connotea is a free online reference management service for scientists, researchers, and clinicians, created in December 2004 by Nature Publishing Group. It is one of a new breed of social bookmarking tools, similar to Delicious, where users can save links to their favourite websites. It has a lot of great websites that are tagged by the users. Via the ' extract links' option we catch these sites and automatically give them a refinement. So you will see a lot of these sites, that are discovered by the users of Connotea, in the Scoofers results under the refinement Science. We are sure this improves the search results even more. Remember that all sites that are in Google, are also present in Scoofers, and only the order and the refinement labels give you a better search experience!
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
SCOOFERS, SMART SEARCHING ON THE INTERNET
Scoofers, a new search engine that combines search results with popular bookmarks of users, has been launched in the US and in the Netherlands.
Relevant search results
Scoofers is a new search engine that quickly finds what you are searching for. Many well-known search engines only generate automatic search results, but Scoofers uses expert knowledge when ranking the results. This makes the search results more relevant.
Scoofers fetches the expert knowledge from social bookmarking websites where people share their favourite links. These websites are particularly popular in the US and have millions of users. Scoofers ranks its search results based on the popularity of these shared links. In addition to the general search engine, four special search engines have been launched: Travel, Electronics, Party & Dining and Fashion Shopping.
Refined search
Thousands of websites have been refined, such as “for youth” or “for seniors.” These refinements are based on the popularity of the social bookmarks. The user will see more relevant websites using these refinements.
Jeroen Maljers, founder of Scoofers cites: “Are you looking for a holiday in France for the whole family? Simply search under Travel Scoofers for ‘France’ and select the “for families” refined search function.”
Easy to use
Scoofers has a clear layout and is easy to use. Handy tools, such as a search engine toolbar, can be downloaded from the Scoofers website.
Note from Jeroen Maljers:" Above our press release. We are live in the US and the Netherlands! After 6 months of programming and labeling the internet we introduce our search engine. Please test our services and give us feedback. Best regards, Jeroen".
Relevant search results
Scoofers is a new search engine that quickly finds what you are searching for. Many well-known search engines only generate automatic search results, but Scoofers uses expert knowledge when ranking the results. This makes the search results more relevant.
Scoofers fetches the expert knowledge from social bookmarking websites where people share their favourite links. These websites are particularly popular in the US and have millions of users. Scoofers ranks its search results based on the popularity of these shared links. In addition to the general search engine, four special search engines have been launched: Travel, Electronics, Party & Dining and Fashion Shopping.
Refined search
Thousands of websites have been refined, such as “for youth” or “for seniors.” These refinements are based on the popularity of the social bookmarks. The user will see more relevant websites using these refinements.
Jeroen Maljers, founder of Scoofers cites: “Are you looking for a holiday in France for the whole family? Simply search under Travel Scoofers for ‘France’ and select the “for families” refined search function.”
Easy to use
Scoofers has a clear layout and is easy to use. Handy tools, such as a search engine toolbar, can be downloaded from the Scoofers website.
Note from Jeroen Maljers:" Above our press release. We are live in the US and the Netherlands! After 6 months of programming and labeling the internet we introduce our search engine. Please test our services and give us feedback. Best regards, Jeroen".
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Introduction to Scoofers; a social search engine
This first post I will give an introduction to Scoofers in general; how we came up with the idea, what we changed during the last year and what our short term plans are.
Early 2006 I discovered a technology by Google to mix Google results with self defined search results, even for other people. These internet searchers needed to subscribe themselves to your links. Google calls the technology CO-Op or subscribed links. I put a button to subscribe on these subscribed links on the website of our online marketing consultancy company and thought that we could give people free tips on online marketing topics that got blended with Google results. Nicely added value and maybe some extra customers. Hardly anybody subscribed, mostly because a Google account was needed and in the Netherlands penetration was maybe 5% then. But the idea was nice.
Later Google came with the concept of a customized search engine. The basic concept is that Google provides a free search tool for searching on your own website or on websites concerning a specific topic, like ' pet food' or ' online marketing'. Simultaniously I was dissatisfied with results in search engines and Google was introducing Universal search. Now in Google you saw a lot of pages in de results that were not directly giving you what you need, but a lot of pages were just made for Adsense and another extra step in the destination of the searcher. On top of that Universal search is to my opinion not a strong move by Google. Too much wasted space on the first page of the SERP's.
What's the solution? Back to the old day's, before Google, when we tried to organize everything in directories? Or just use the social bookmarking sites like del.ico.us, Digg etc. Hey, Why not blend those all?!! Why don't we make a search engine that use the technology and database of Google, re-organised the results based on the labels in the directories that thousands of experts in years of time have provided us and boost the sites a but that are popular on Digg etc. That's how we came up with Scoofers, refined search. So we did: we used Google Co-op and customized searh engine technology and use the content on Digg, Delicious, Technorati, Yahoo directories, DMOZ and many more.
Introduction is planned for mid june.
Early 2006 I discovered a technology by Google to mix Google results with self defined search results, even for other people. These internet searchers needed to subscribe themselves to your links. Google calls the technology CO-Op or subscribed links. I put a button to subscribe on these subscribed links on the website of our online marketing consultancy company and thought that we could give people free tips on online marketing topics that got blended with Google results. Nicely added value and maybe some extra customers. Hardly anybody subscribed, mostly because a Google account was needed and in the Netherlands penetration was maybe 5% then. But the idea was nice.
Later Google came with the concept of a customized search engine. The basic concept is that Google provides a free search tool for searching on your own website or on websites concerning a specific topic, like ' pet food' or ' online marketing'. Simultaniously I was dissatisfied with results in search engines and Google was introducing Universal search. Now in Google you saw a lot of pages in de results that were not directly giving you what you need, but a lot of pages were just made for Adsense and another extra step in the destination of the searcher. On top of that Universal search is to my opinion not a strong move by Google. Too much wasted space on the first page of the SERP's.
What's the solution? Back to the old day's, before Google, when we tried to organize everything in directories? Or just use the social bookmarking sites like del.ico.us, Digg etc. Hey, Why not blend those all?!! Why don't we make a search engine that use the technology and database of Google, re-organised the results based on the labels in the directories that thousands of experts in years of time have provided us and boost the sites a but that are popular on Digg etc. That's how we came up with Scoofers, refined search. So we did: we used Google Co-op and customized searh engine technology and use the content on Digg, Delicious, Technorati, Yahoo directories, DMOZ and many more.
Introduction is planned for mid june.
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